SESSION-STATE IN ASP.NET

ASP.NET provides three distinct ways to store session data for your application: in-process session state, out-of-process session state as a Windows service, and out-of-process session state in a SQL Server database. Each has it advantages.

1.In-process session-state mode

Limitations: * When using the in-process session-state mode, session-state data is lost if aspnet_wp.exe or the application domain restarts. * If you enable Web garden mode in the < processModel > element of the application's Web.config file, do not use in-process session-state mode. Otherwise, random data loss can occur. Advantage: * in-process session state is by far the fastest solution. If you are storing only small amounts of volatile data in session state, it is recommended that you use the in-process provider.

2. The State Server

It simply stores session state in memory when in out-of-proc mode. In this mode the worker process talks directly to the State Server

3. SQL mode

It session states are stored in a SQL Server database and the worker process talks directly to SQL. The ASP.NET worker processes are then able to take advantage of this simple storage service by serializing and saving (using .NET serialization services) all objects within a client's Session collection at the end of each Web request Both these out-of-process solutions are useful primarily if you scale your application across multiple processors or multiple computers, or where data cannot be lost if a server or process is restarted.